Verdict: Could be argued that it is the finest movie made as yet
on superheroes.

Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-fi, Fantasy

Height and elevation and all their vertically aligned synonyms
seem to be at the very heart of Mr. Snyder’s film. I look at my 11-month old
daughter who crawls on the floor and cranes her neck up looking at us expectantly.
She tries to hold onto things and stand up and gain height she doesn’t have.
Height gives her control, and when we squash bugs with our foot or stomp on little
palms, it could be said, height gives us power and thereby a measure of
cruelty. For a reason, I guess, we have all those close-ups in all those movies
of shiny leather shoes rubbing cigarette butts to the ground. Height is
aspirational, and there could be a version of Mr. Snyder’s film told entirely
through eyes looking up, sometimes in awe, sometimes in prayer and sometimes
with pure anger running through them.

If height and scale and superhero movies are all essentially
synonyms of each other, then is it almost understandable that they are
inherently about violence? I mean, is there a superhero who can put babies to
sleep, and for a one-liner asks his baby daughter – “Do you bleed...You will.” Or maybe, being a superhero is
intrinsically about action, about being masculine, and doing things. It is only logical then that Mr. Snyder
contextualizes his film in an epoch – “Mankind
is introduced to the Superman” – and turns what has been
transcendent/escapist only a moment back – a young Bruce levitating (a man’s
refuge to fantasy interpreted as an altitudinal exercise, and thus a synecdoche
for religion et al.?) – into a matter-of-fact and often ruthless visualization
of a world with Superman.

The sky and its stars have ceased to be wonders, and Mr. Snyder
seems to flatten, or reduce the distance between the land and the clouds, often
framing them like a chamber, not an expansive wondrous unknown, but a cagey
known. In one terrific moment, Diana Prince (Ms. Gadot) looks on as the
Superman (Mr. Cavill) bursts through the sky and pile drives Doomsday, all in
one shot and seemingly (but not actually) in one frame. It is a shot of the
Superman’s speed, but it also seems to render the sky so perilously close to
the land, like when Cloverfield burst through it and into our lives all those
days back. Modern world-in-peril disaster movies do have images with both the
sky and the land, like typhoons, or portals from other worlds, but they often
seem to want to have a sense of awe, often going for outright scale (numbers,
width), or have it look at it vertically. This one here is just flat and
matter-of-fact and interestingly (okay, probably not intentionally) from Ms.
Prince’s point-of-view.

Which leads me to another instance of a very interesting
point-of-view shot, of the Batman looking at Doomsday wreak havoc to both
Superman and Ms. Prince, and thus rendered effectively an onlooker.

These shots, of an utter lack of control, of being dwarfed, of
being effectively emasculated, is the perspective we need of the Batman
(especially when everybody thinks the ending of The Dark Knight Rises is a dream), much in tune with all the
Rorschachs and Nite Owls rendered inconsequential in the age of Dr. Manhattan. Batman’s
Gotham is spoken of as a city that is a world unto itself, not much unlike the
little villages Hercules Poirot and Sherlock Holmes visited nearby London to
solve cases. The idea probably is to have Metropolis (much like London for the
two detectives, or New York City for Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow) a setting for the real world and its modern
dynamics, and those little villages act as settings far removed from the
reality – a place where Batman has been something of a demi-god for a good part
of twenty years. The arrival of Superman collapses those definitions and
associated boundaries, and Mr. Snyder’s narrative rhetoric – of stacking the
narrative of Batman within the world of Superman – contrasts the scope of this
contextualization quite brilliantly. Metropolis falls down as the world looks
in awe and shock. Villages are razed somewhere in Africa, and Superman is
credited. A senator hears the tale of a woman whose parents died in those
villages. And amidst all that, Batman’s nightly shenanigans of hanging from the
ceiling in a room somewhere in Gotham where Asian women are kept prisoners, and
then doing the standard-issue disappearing act feel, well, childish. The point
is, Bruce Wayne knows that, and to echo Alfred’s observation (we will come to
it in a minute), which is one of the film’s central ideas, it makes him cruel
to cause effectiveness.

The thing about cruelty is that it is a relatively faster way of
seeing a desired effect. A need for cruelty is borne out of a desire to witness
fast change, and one way to go about it is to perform the desired set of
actions. The Batman could break your jaw, but then the Superman could ram you
through walls within a blink of an eye. There is little choice but for a
superhero movie to be inherently about violence, about exhibiting the adolescent
need for control when there is none, and there Alfred’s one-line explanation of
the film’s central theme - about how a lack of control turns good people cruel
- coming right at the heel of both Superman and Batman's exploits is a useful example
of Hollywood’s pragmatic approach to show-and-tell narration. Alternately, as
Armond White suggests here, it is a lovely little romance.

Parents loom large, well obviously, and Mr. Snyder draws
interesting correlations here, especially between Lex Luthor (Mr. Eisenberg)
and Bruce Wayne, each missing a father, and each distrusting/envying this new
God. Where Bruce’s is a crisis of masculinity, Lex’s is a cousin – a crisis of
identity. Lex is a millennial, his personal issues cloaked under a garb of pop
culture references and academic jargon. Bruce speaks like a conservative (“the son of a bitch brought war to us”), and
Lex – referencing his father’s struggles in Nazi Europe – speaks like the
leftist millennial desperate to have equality across the board (meta-humans,
aliens), his superpower being knowledge. Ms.
Lionel Shriver has written a terrific piece down at New York Times while I
write about this film, and you should forgive me if I am seeing parallels where
there are none.

Superman, meanwhile, sees parallels in aerial and opaque
elements like the military drone (symbolic that he knocks them out in the
opening act, and yet humanity at large questions his motives and the
presence/absence of humanity). While some folks show the middle finger to the drones, some
raise their hands and pray to the Superman.

Superman has always been an abstraction, and we never truly
understand (in a quantifying sense if you will) the limits and scope of his
powers, and using that as the central examination factor of the character, it
very much seems to me that Mr. Snyder, in Dawn
of Justice, has made the finest picture on Clark Kent. In shots of tremendous
isolation, he finds Clark so terribly confused and lonely, so eager to be
understood and approved of, and so easily eulogized or demonized. This is a
young man here, having his own daddy issues, and so easily branded an
authority, and Mr. Cavill – in our age where gritty James Bonds and dark Jason
Bournes are probably working overtime to find an anchoring for us millennials –
brings grace and dignity to Superman. Again, and I could guilty here of elitism
and condescension, and I do beg your pardon in advance, but where a lot of
Marvel’s popularity is centered around Iron Man and Hulk (again representations
of the ironical generation), I believe the heart lay in Mr. Chris Evans’
Captain America. Here is an extremely likable actor playing a character from
the 30s trying to come to terms with the present age, and with Mr. Cavill’s Clark
Kent we have a millennial trying to live the ideology of a man from the 30s (an
abstract idea again) – being confused between exercising unilateral power to
respecting to seeking approval to loving and as a result always in a state of flux.
In
my notes on Man of Steel I had
mentioned parallels to Kazantzakis’ Christ. It is a beautiful performance,
of a native who has always known he is an immigrant, a pretender worried about
getting caught, a wanderer desperate to find a home, or a world. Mr. Snyder has
built a world where I so eagerly want to get into and which I fear will not stay
the way it is for too long, and I hope I am wrong.

Monday, January 04, 2016

Verdict: The most formally accomplished American film of its
year. A textbook for genre filmmaking. And I very much want to agree with its
politics.

Genre: Thriller, Drama, Action

Spoilers below!

Before we go
into the politics of it all, which frankly could be that it is not a country
for women, and which unfortunately will send the PC police into throwing hissy
fits, it is worthwhile to look at the technique employed here from an academic
perspective. Mr. Villeneuve looks to be an expert director-for-hire, and Sicario is one of those rare films from
around now which can be visited and revisited just to study how to capture
conversations or movements. It is always fun to break down a scene, to
understand why it works the way it works, so that it can be repeated. You see,
capturing drama is quite similar to capturing a process – the accumulation of
details – and it is satisfying (academically) when a scene can be explained not
on the basis of performances but on the basis of its editing (an elitist
sentiment, I suppose, or maybe a pretension of analytical prowess). A scene
that is simply a sum of its parts is for me a reason for comfort, and the one I
would have a jab at breaking down occurs early in the film, after an FBI SWAT
raid led by Kate Mercer (Ms. Blunt) on a suspect kidnap house controlled by
drug cartels ends up in an explosion killing two of her team members. She is
sitting in an office along with her partner Reggie Wayne (Mr. Kaluuya), outside
of a meeting room where several older men (the youngest must be only around 40)
are having some sort of discussion. The office is wall-to-wall glass
see-through partitioning, and we enter this setting via a news report of the
explosion on a television screen hanging on one of the walls. We hear the news
report, and just as it is about to end, we cut to a POV (over-the-shoulder)
shot of Kate looking at the screen, and we now hear no audio.

The glass partitioning might offer “transparency” but it sure as
hell isn’t revealing a great deal of information. If you see in the POV shot,
there is one glass partitioning in the foreground too, and Mr. Villeneuve provides
the next cut looking at Kate and Reggie in a two-shot from within their enclosure. The meeting room is behind them and they
cannot hear a word of what is being said. I would want to extend you the
liberty of extrapolating this whole glass setting as something of a metaphor
for what happens in the film, especially from Kate’s perspective. She sees
everything and understands nothing, and just as that is intended to be the
disposition of the office, that is probably the objective of the smoke-and-mirrors
mission she is about to get into.

We cut back again to the POV shot, but this time around we hear
the discussion happening within the room, which Kate obviously cannot hear. All
of this happens over a quick 25-30 second period, establishing the setting,
which after the prologue-serving explosion, functions as the set-up for the
whole narrative. Let us just say that Mr. Tarantino would either have Chapter 1
here, or after the intermission have a Chapter 5, attached to this, and accordingly
either label it The Glass Partitioned
Office or The Operation of the Glass Partitioned
Office.

Kate is
called in and introduced and interviewed over a quick couple of minutes and
that is not the conversation I am interested in, leaving you to discover it.
She comes out and sits beside Reggie, does a quick survey of she still has no
idea, and that is when the discussion is done and folks move out, and one of
them asks Kate to come in. It is a terribly efficient moment, all built on following
the eye-line movements from Kate, and accordingly cutting the room into
close-ups (thus revealing the inherent inconsistencies), or aligning them all
together (the authority v/s Kate).

Here is the video, and allow this moment to remind you of a
conversation with an interview panel, or better still, when you were up for promotion
(or you had the technical information required that was needed to make a
decision) and you were called in to an executive meeting, where you never felt
you were supposed to have a seat:

Now the first
thing to notice is the layout of the panel and how Mr. Villeneuve uses Kate’s
head to set up the power dynamic within it. There’s three on the left, and one
to her right, sitting alone (who has had the benefit of Kate’s curious glance at
his flip-flops as opposed to everybody in suits and ties, thus his complete
distinction and an escalation in his authority), and just as soon the grand old
man in the room Dave Jennings (Mr. Garber), her boss, introduces the purpose
while the final person takes his seat towards his left, he introduces Matt
Graver (Mr. Brolin) while everybody looks at him (nobody else is introduced).

Essentially, just through
precise composition, Matt’s been served something of a primer for a close-up, without
explicitly doing so, and he remains the power center. Not surprisingly, Kate
senses this dynamic and asks a pointed question about the identity of this
operation, i.e. whether is it still this (Phoenix) office that is in authority,
and we don’t see her face, and thus we have no idea whom the question has been
addressed to. The familiar face is that of her boss, but everybody to her left
immediately looks in Matt’s general direction, while he doesn’t bat an eyelid
before answering.

This is pretty much the film’s core idea that addresses and
motivates its examination of motion. The explosive opening, which literally has
the narrative hit the ground running, has the SWAT team move-in towards a target, which exists within a suburban set-up
with something of a compound wall – a representation of jurisdictional space.

Later on, in the film’s best sequence and one of the year’s highlights,
the movement is freer, smoother and expansive. A convoy glides thorough border
checkpoints travelling at a breakneck speed and the mobility here – as a
representation/display of power (and old-world power dynamics) – is exhilarating.
It is pure cinema.

Mr. Villeneuve hints the arrival of this overdramatic display
couple of times, most notably when Kate gets on Matt’s chartered plane on her
visit to “El Paso” area, where the plane seems to leave the jurisdictional
disciplined and dare I say liberal urban space behind. A space where the
neighborhood as all the symptoms of utter peace, and its dark underbelly (the
walls of the house) is where the unsociable is repressed to. As the plane takes
off, we see the topography change, and as opposed to the cut-and-dried version
of demarcated boundaries – walls and fences – what we seem to have is something
of a delimited zone up for grabs and where Kate’s liberal idealistic tendencies
will probably be as effective as a knife in a gunfight.

Trivializing Kate’s
idealistic politics as a variation of Winston Churchill’s
or whosoever’s quote (“If you're not
a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty
you have no brain”) is not the point here, and it is not what Sicario is doing. There’s another story
from Mexico – of a cop Silvio (Mr. Hernández) his soccer loving kid and his
pure domestic no-nonsense wife – and Mr. Villeneuve is using to suggest what a
war almost always is – our way of life versus theirs – and the inherent
self-righteousness of it. A victory is not merely a territorial or a political
grab, and is often a justification of an ideology. More so here, the urban disciplined
space v/s the absolute anarchy of Juarez, the liberal America v/s the
conservative Mexico, highlighted by a minor moment where one of the men on the
mission ask Kate to finish her cigarette before presenting herself before a bunch
of Mexican immigrants at a border patrol station. Needless to say, when she
presents herself, all eyes are on her – an American woman amongst the authority.
To
navigate this region of expanded and ambiguous boundaries, Sicario chooses the best perspective to narrate itself, that of
Kate, who is like a fresher on a job, and has next to no idea what’s going on
(the comic version of this scenario is how Danny Ocean and Rusty deal with
Linus’ ambitions in Ocean’s Twelve).

And it is this perspective that is established here in this
short conversation we are discussing, with her head (and her eyes) navigating
this room and trying to make sense out of it, or at least draw some sort of narrative.
The others take their cue from Matt’s succinct description of who’s in charge,
and everybody else pitches in essentially reiterating that she will be acting
under Matt. The script distributes them one line each, the chorus to Matt’s
lead if you will, before cutting to Kate’s close-up.

The next
instruction set comes from one of the chorus members ending with a question to
Matt about the rendezvous point, and Mr. Villeneuve instead of giving us a
reverse shot of this, follows Kate’s eyes and her further realization of the
power dynamic. Her eyes traverse the heads from her left to right and halts in
the general direction of Matt’s.

Kate asks him another question before Matt tells her whom they
are going to meet, which is not so much the point as much as it aligns them in
a shot. Here is a shift in the dynamic, and a realization on Kate’s part where
the brains behind the mission lay. The others are near to being unnecessary.

And here’s
when Kate instinctively asks him a pointed question (almost out of some sort of
distrust) seemingly to test the waters – about where Guillermo is – which doesn’t
make Matt uneasy but does make him spin a little web, and for which he looks at
his chorus members. The next cut, which draws the first confirmation of the
chasms in the panel, is to Kate’s boss Dave (he alone in the frame) and he has
some sort of a disappointed blink, which is immediately caught by Kate, and
which is established by an eye-line-match-cut.

Which immediately draws Kate to ask the next pointed question.

The first cut
is to a close-up of the guy to Dave’s right, but it is only to serve him as a
reference point (if there were numbering, this guy would most probably be second-in-command)
for Matt to spin his web, because just as soon the cut points to him he looks
at Matt and we have an eye-line match and a wry smile before the big punchline
comes –

At which point, a completely new angle is chosen for
Kate, a little more removed causing a medium rather than a close-up and a few
degrees towards the middle from the earlier angle which aligned her from the
farthest guy on her left so that we follow her gaze, and now which aligns on the
straight line between her and Dave. Now, I might be guilty of reading too much
into these lines or attributing them with too much weight, but Sicario is nothing if not bothering
itself with a woman in an essentially man’s world. The narrative does seem to
be about Kate’s dynamic with the men around her with the drug war providing the
backdrop, which in the case of Alejandro (Mr. Del Toro) is almost a stand-in
for a relationship.

So before we
go to what Dave has to say, let me make a few politically incorrect statements
and which might cause me the dreaded foot-in-the-mouth disease. The thing with Sicario is it is more or less a
narrative about Kate’s domestication (she’s divorced). We’ve Reggie, who serves
the archetype of a girl’s best friend who has ambitions to be her one true
soulmate and who is liberal enough to never outright propose her, or shall we
sway her, but make gentle jabs at her personal life so as inch his way close to
her, probably because he is too proud to be crass. But then, he is pretty much
consumed by the state of her personal life and I wouldn’t be surprised if he
were secretly spending a few tissues on her now and then. He questions her about
her bra (in his mind, he is the closest to her) which she shrugs off, but he is
too eager to get the conversation around her personal life (this is the
Hannibal Lecter syndrome, if you will, where you gets aroused from knowing a
person’s personal secrets and which becomes a substitute for plain sex) and later
in the bar continues to go on about it.

With Alejandro though, it is Kate who is drawn towards him and
the mysterious air around him. It is an extremely conservative view of things
(there is a reaction shot for Reggie just as soon as Alejandro asks Kate about
her well-being after the attempt on her life was made), but then Sicario is something of a Stanley Milgram
obedience experiment, by the end of which Kate has been systemically broken
into submission. It is a complex character, an idealist without a hook
half-understanding the pragmatism the authority claims, and this is a great
performance from Ms. Blunt whose mere reactions are one of the highlights/pleasures
of the year gone by. The authorities, in their part, are not husbands or
boyfriends but straight up father figures, none more so than Mr. Del Toro’s
Alejandro, who at the end asks her to leave and make herself anonymous, just
like her counterpart – Silvio’s widowed wife. The point is that this is not an ideological
war and that their way of life isn’t too different from ours, and when
Alejandro leaves Kate in her balcony, she is an almost helpless captive – to her
own fascination directed towards him, and that her idealistic tendencies is
what ultimately tie in with her domestic tendencies. She is a little girl, and
if we come back to the line, Dave demonstrates his protective instincts first
right after Matt’s punchline.

To which Kate responds in
atypical fashion, i.e. breaking away from the umbrella of paternal protection
and seizing control by asking a question (mostly rhetorical, from a obedience
perspective), underlined yet again by her moving gaze, which starts from Dave
and ends with who else but Matt.

And here, we see for the first time the camera up-close with
Matt, and the negative space around him vastly reduced. He is committed, so to
speak, and the contrast between his laidback attitude up until now to the
solemn response here is a pretty good example of the kind of kitsch authority
employs.

No wonder Kate
volunteers, for she now feels in control, and I am reminded of Elizabeth Swann
from Mr. Verbinski’s Pirates of the
Caribbean trilogy. Here is an equally strong character, living under her
father’s protective umbrella and curious about another world so as to provide a
series its narrative perspective. Those films were Liz’s story just as this is
Kate’s, but between travelling with the left (pirates) to eventually becoming a
lord and marrying one, the former was essentially liberated from her
conservative background. Kate, on the other hand, seems to be charting the
opposite route – in Alejandro we might have somebody similar to Jack Sparrow. Which
begs the question – is it so morally intellectually and emotionally crippling
when one starts to see and understand the conservative perspective? Also, is there
anybody who leans more heavily on the frame than Mr. Del Toro?

The overriding
feeling at the end of it is of being unsatisfied. A lack of closure, maybe,
because every time a secret is revealed in any mystery the relationship the viewer
(or reader) shares with the people in the narrative becomes the primary factor.
If a detective were to find a killer in a room full of people, there better be
enough people in the first place, because they serve as the audience for whom
the secret is being unraveled. If there were none, and if the detective were to
simply turn towards us and indulge himself in a monologue detailing his methods
and discoveries, I’m not sure we will be half as satisfied. Why? Because the
percolation of the information serves as some sort of justice, an identity that
has been revealed, and rightly so. That everybody in the audience knows isn’t enough,
but what is important is that everybody in there knows and we have the closure
that justice has prevailed. We cannot affect that world in there, except for
instance, when Robert Langdon learns the true location of Mary Magdalene’s
sarcophagus, and it is something of an interesting scenario because at that
moment it (the illusion of the narrative) very much blurs the boundaries
between fact/fiction providing for a real-life place, which serves as the
bridge. So, either the mystery provides us with that bridge, an object of some
sort that has travelled through time, or it provides the necessary proxy.

That is a
major reason Ms. Christie’s Death on the
Nile has always left me cold, and feels at best to be an academic exercise
in overturning an archetype – that of the innocent but sure-to-judge audience –
and if everybody is either a victim or a murderer, the world becomes a pretty
cynical little place, like you know No
Country for Old Men. Still, and until the secret is revealed, the very
prospect of a significant (subjective,
and the crowd presents assurance with the potential
of providing closure) audience is cause enough to be excited by the mystery at
hand. Gosford Park did follow that
prescription, and surprisingly (read: disappointingly) Mr. Tarantino, who has pretty
much internalized
the theory around shock v/s suspense, just doesn’t give us enough by way of
the prospect of an audience. There is Team A, consisting of a couple of bounty
hunters, one of whom is black, a sheriff-in-waiting and a woman waiting to be
hanged, riding on a stagecoach. There is Team B – consisting of a Mexican
running the inn, an overelaborate Englishman (I’m confused whether Mr. Roth was
doing a version of his character from Four
Rooms, or if Mr. Waltz simply wasn’t available because of Spectre), an overelaborate Michael
Madsen lookalike, and a Confederate General – whom Team A meets once they
arrive at a haberdashery. Now, one might claim that Team B isn’t really a team,
and I might want to argue back saying that between the title and the laws of
suspense, any collection of people is a cause to be suspicious about, especially
when an outlaw is being taken to be hanged to some place (a standard trope) in
a western. So essentially we have set who walks in to a bar, and a set waiting
in the bar, and were Ms. Christie the writer here, I suspect she would have had
folks walk in at different times. A murder mystery is never about teams and
always about individuals. The very prospect of an innocent bystander unsuspectingly
walk into an established scene of tension doesn’t merely align our concerns for
his well-being, it relieves himself from all suspicion while also providing him
the opportunity to assume the role of a moral authority (Mr. Mangold’s Identity). No such luck here in Minnie’s
haberdashery, and between all the chattering and cursing Mr. Tarantino writes
himself into a corner while dealing with the false identities, the reveal
around which isn’t merely unremarkable it is downright lazy. This is the
problem – someone from team B says they are X. Alright. It is not Mr. Pink or
Mr. Yellow, but just some overelaborate name. Then in the end, they say they
are Y. The audience naturally is distrustful because we have no hook to hang on
to – we don’t have any clues like the bottom of a coffee mug, or clippings spread
around a cop’s wall – and Mr. Tarantino simply has someone from Team A do a “Ah,
yeah!” routine every time someone from Team B reveal their Y identities. It is
meaningless, a confirmation and a what-if-it’s-hot at the same time, and thus a
cop-out.

So, when things
reveal themselves we aren’t really surprised. We are waiting and more
importantly we do not have the closure of justice being served. It is an interesting
proposition at first hand, especially when the film ends with an event that serves
as moral justice – the hanging of the woman. Now, before we have the PC police
start frothing in their mouths, it is useful to highlight that none of these
folks are really “hateful”. They are more like mildly annoying, and to be
offended by their racial slurs and woman-beating is just about as kitschy a
reaction as wondering how Mr. Coppola made such immensely “morally corrupt”
individuals so likable, or be “horrified” at the evil that Mr. Hopkins’ Hannibal
Lecter presents. It is a middlebrow reaction at best and a self-congratulatory
reaction at worst, and it ignores that morality within a narrative is relative
and more importantly contextual. Hateful/Despicable is that wonderful psycho in
Mr. Miike’s Shield of Straw, or those
serial killers in some of those Korean films. I might argue that honor overrides
all other negativities, more so in a western, and one might argue then that
even the hierarchy of morality has been shaped by patriarchy. I don’t know, and
let us do a roll call. Major Marquis Warren (Mr. Jackson) is a bounty hunter
(an anti-hero at best), and to be fair what does he do – excite a Confederate
General into drawing a weapon to kill him by recounting to him how he raped the
General’s son (a symbolic act more than anything, underlined by Warren’s hint
towards the images being created and thus a reality, a notion that ties in with
fantasy history from his previous two films), which importantly was a reaction
to the righteous son’s action of
trying to kill him. There’s no standalone action (cause-effect) at any level,
and the Major feels morally justified,
because on both the counts he has a reason – the Confederate General denying
him his identity, and his son wanting to deny him his life. The bounty hunter
John Ruth (Mr. Russell) punches a woman alright, but then she is a dreaded
criminal (imagine a man in her place). We can go along, but the point is that
nobody here is despicable, just people acting self-righteously.

So, when the
woman is hanged at the end by the two remaining folks, within the moral
framework of the film, it is justified, because she has always been the
antagonist – she has no stakes, and her identity is that she is merely a
criminal (as opposed to say a woman who has been exploited all her life and
thus been pushed to choose this life, and the expected self-congratulatory
blah-blah), and she spends the narrative being the antagonist (knowing a secret
and letting folks suffer and die). If you agree with me here, her hanging (an
exercise designed for its theatricality) has no audience, apart from the
hangmen. We have travelled a long distance for only to have her hang in
private, which is just about the same as John Ruth hanging her just as soon he
caught her. Not quite, as a matter of fact. You see, the two men in the end are
the two who are indeed the innocent bystanders, and who represent the history/politics
Mr. Tarantino is most interested in – the simple binary of the black man and
the racial white man. As all binaries, it is a reductive representation of
history, and under the now-annoying idea of Abraham Lincoln as a representation
of all that is great about America (and world? Is this newfound fascination
with Lincoln a highlight of the Obama presidency?) a simplistic fantasy. Having
Lincoln treated less like a man and more like an idea (we have our own in our
current Prime Minister) is just about the same as having him hunt down
vampires, and I hope we get less of it in the future. Also, maybe, a little
less of allusions to Jesus Christ, mostly because I’m not sure Daisy is some
sort of innocent lamb slaughtered to give the folks a notion of justice.

What bugs me though is how lazy the film feels. The entire first
hour is essentially folks howling dialogues at each other and long shots of the
stagecoach running through the snow serving as filler. Everybody is in the same
room, and when Major Warren tells elaborate tales about “black dicks in white mouths” you wonder what everybody else is
doing. Where the hell are the reaction shots? Two folks are vomiting blood
right after and we have no reaction shots from Major Warren, who is quite
essentially our protagonist here. Isn’t everybody sharing the same moment? It
is a strange choice, and I wonder what purpose it served, because for me, it
only provided a convenient mystery around who drugged the coffee. There are
meaningless foreboding shots of the outhouse, couple of them in fact, and all
they serve is some cheap horror movie atmosphere. And the flashback chapter? Would
we have been better served with a placard instead?

Most importantly though, I wonder why I am left unimpressed with
Mr. Tarantino’s scores. For e.g. the harmonica thing in Kill Bill Vol. II when she walks in the desert, and here the
opening. Is it because out of several choices he simply picks the most obvious
one, so that rather than being captivated by the score at hand I am reminded of
the likeliness? I don’t know, but the opening horror thing felt completely disconnected
from the imagery (imagine The Shining’s
opening score and its synthesis with the movement on the screen), almost as if
I could go ahead and score the same images with Old Turkey Buzzard and lose out on nothing. Maybe, on his eighth
film, Mr. Tarantino was just plain uninspired to make one, and is rather
interested in making a contribution to theatre. If he does it sometime in the
future, I hope this film will serve as a first draft.

Note: This is essentially an
overelaborate MOM of a discussion I had with Gaurang Joshi.

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Verdict: The best Bond film since GoldenEye. Mr. Mendes’ best film. And one of the best of the year.

Genre: Action, Thriller, Mystery

There is the
old and there is the new. The gloriously stylish opening sequence, which gives
way to a vertiginous tussle in a chopper over what looks like old Mexico, has
James Bond fly over shiny new urban skyscrapers into the title sequence. It is
the Day of the Dead, and the ease with which it establishes the narrative’s
rhetoric around spaces – the old and the new, the new coming out of the old –
had me rethink my stance on the worth of Mr. Mendes as a filmmaker. He has
always felt sterile to me, and here he makes me realize why the best of James
Bond might represent the absolute gold-standard in action-adventure cinema,
which Spectre certainly is, and why
Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Lucas chose to describe Raiders of the Lost Ark as “a
James Bond film without the hardware”. I will not want to put down the
competition offered by the Mission
Impossible franchise, or the Jason Bourne who-am-I quest, but neither of
them understand spaces as well as Mr. Mendes does here, or Mr. Spielberg almost
always does. Maybe, it is unfair to even ask of them – the Ethan Hunt films are
exercises in stunts the spaces scarcely meaning anything more than a set-up –
but Bourne’s version of memory represented by a what (plot) so much so that the
hotel in Berlin almost doesn’t seem to exist on its own other than to serve as
a place where events happened is certainly disappointing. Mr. Mendes
understands the value of spaces, as a site of the conflict between the old and
the new, as a site where history is shaped, and as a site where somebody like
James Bond can find his past. That both history and James Bond’s past are
inter-linked are not a matter of coincidence at all, and when we will have the
luxury of a hindsight of fifty or so years, we might want to look at him just
as we would look Dante or every such poet/academic ever since (say Mr. Todd
Haynes’ I’m not There or Mr. Lech
Majewski’s Field of Dogs) who has
positioned himself at the center of the world.

There is a
meteor in the middle of a state-of-the-art information gathering-processing
center, like Google’s World Brain project center, that itself is in the sort of
middle of nowhere that reminds one of Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, and the stagey showman that Mr. Mendes is
(and not always in a good way) he has the antagonist literally materialize in
the light from the darkness around. Mr. Waltz is one of our absolute treasures,
and his Franz Oberhauser is the kind of character you are really curious to get
into the head of. The guy written on the page is standard-issue, but between
Mr. Mendes’s close-ups and Mr. Waltz reactions, we almost always seem to have a
bit of a mystery before us who’s not quite Silva (The Joker, refreshing to have
a bad guy not in it to just watch the world burn) operating in a
I-have-no-value-for-my-life mode but he’s not entirely Hans Gruber either. The
cut through this eye only intensifies the mystery, and Mr. Mendes chooses to
concentrate on his reactions, giving us ample time to wonder what exactly is
going on inside so much so that one can conceive Spectre to be an origin-story for him as much as it is a revelation
for James Bond. But that is beside the point I’m trying to make here, because
Mr. Mendes and Mr. Hoytema indulge in liberal usage of the long shot with so
much to see, which is a delight when you wonder how somebody could have walked
into a mountain-top alpine snow set clinic only to see a runway towards the
top-right corner of the screen making one realize this must be a rich man’s
place only to be rewarded with James Bond making an entry into a chase in a
small plane. All spaces reveal, or it is almost their purpose to reveal (as any
mystery has to) so much so that the plot almost seems subservient to these
spaces. Mr. Mendes, surprisingly for a modern action picture, spends so much
time in each of them because that is where he almost deriving the plot from, or
at least manufacturing it around them. The spaces are not merely rhetoric, as they were in Skyfall, and have a terrific immersive quality to them. Of course,
that is just my opinion – the old intelligence building versus the new
intelligence tower across the river, which is definitely an agenda much in tune
with the
insecurities at the heart of Skyfall, or the glossy new Aston Martin
against the old one (Aston Martin? pardon me, not much into Bond trivia) – but then
there’s James Bond’s house, which feels less of a statement, like say Patrick
Bateman’s in American Psycho, and
more like a den with its shadows and lights. When Moneypenny (Ms. Harris) visits
him, there is an air of intrigue, and the space is set-up for reveals. They are
unknown and the atmosphere tangible, not yet shaped into a narrative until Bond
arrives on some of them, and this is the very structure of an action-adventure
film, walking from one mystery into another – the mystery being the spaces and
not the plot. They are in a hotel in Tangier, and if ever there is a filler
shot for passage of time that in itself is memorable – a pan from the seas to
the hotel, almost as if we were in a different time of archaeological pursuits –
it is this one. Bond wakes up, the midnight air so palpable as if in a dream,
and the room obliges to reveal its secrets as if it were a treasure hidden in a
canyon. And once they are revealed, and the mysterious past known, these places
hold no intrigue and for obvious reasons. A lot of it is about the pure temptation
a space holds (as if one could psychoanalyze the imperialist need to explore
and conquer), its seductiveness if you will, and what is James Bond if not
fetishist. You could wave your Marxist cards and thunder about an argument
about the usual, and I would rather direct you to the moment where Lucia
Sciarra (Ms. Belluci) asks Bond not to go to the conclave to which James Bond
replies – I have to. This temptation, this curiosity, is irresistible you see,
almost like death drive, and Bond staring at the events around the roundtable
is an exhibition of nerve-wracking tension. You see, it is plain and simple,
and the secret to the whole of action-adventure genre are the locations, not
beautiful but mysterious, not factual but historical. No wonder they arrive at
the station with nowhere to go, and waiting for that desert to reveal itself, and
there is this gradual reversal of the trend – from Bond confidently navigating
us through the spaces as in the glorious opening walk over the terrace to the
room in Tangier to the station in the middle of the desert – and the narrative
is sort of built around it. It is as if he were discovering a whole new world,
and it is glorious, just as is the bird’s eye-view of a train calmly moving through
the desert.

So when Bond chastises Oberhauser
for his screens and his overelaborate voyeurism, you got to chuckle, and I’m
not sure if it at the film or with the film, and you got to ask if what James
Bond is doing hunting down places is so very different from Oberhauser’s
cameras every which where consuming spaces into data and consuming it, or as a
friend recently asked, is cinephilia so different from other forms of consumer
activities, like travelling. Bond might seduce women, and Keith
Uhlich in a rather wonderful review here calls it out for what it might be,
but from Mexico to Rome to Tangier the spaces seduce him. Which might lead one
to brand him, as Mr. Uhlich does here, an agent in perpetual forward motion, probably
contributing to the dichotomy between the “serious” Bond (always looking at his
past?) and the ridiculously amusing Bond (jumping to one adventure to the next),
and when Oberhauser starts drilling through his brain in the middle of a super-white
anti-septic room, you wonder if he will hit anything. You see, I wouldn’t want
to make an overelaborate connection to Leonard Shelby (and Memento had a terrific feel for spaces), but Bond is the sort of
character whose past has little meaning and the history around him is his
identity. Reducing that past, or reducing that history, to a set of events
carry little weight, because, and I might sound extremely corny here, Bond’s
identity is not inside him it is around him. The trick is to deck up the
surroundings, and let Bond be himself (whatever that is, a placeholder maybe?),
and if that involves a stunning shot of him and Madeline (Ms. Seydoux) walking
down the villain’s den as if on a ramp, so be it. Not that a moment as tender (Oldboy tender) as Bond asking to stop
the screens from revealing to Madeline what happened to her father is not
welcome, but Mr. Mendes, maybe rightly, chooses on both the occasions, the
event and its echo, to close in on Bond. Maybe there is a little bit too much hullaballoo
around the assassin’s morality thing, or maybe the point is that an assassin
(when he arrives at Madeline’s desk I was reminded of Anton Chigurh visiting
Llewyn Moss’ wife) is still more of a human than a drone dropping bombs. Or maybe,
when the secrets are revealed the Bond I like loses all interest in it, and
rather chooses the girl, and the car, and everything else that is material and
an extension of him. Bond is his world, and before I go all Charlie Kauffman on
you, I just have to talk about that walk. It is a punk walk, like Kevin Bacon’s,
and I should have never been impressed by it. But here I am unable to remove it
from my head.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Mr. Gerlach’s
14 Homicides settles down at the
intersection of geography, of society, of language, of statistics, of memory,
of journalism, and in my case media – or new media, I was watching the film and
googling its events, which I would suggest is probably unadvisable – and suggests
how history and maybe even rhetoric could be give some sort of shape. 14 Homicides feels like an alternate way
of narrativizing a haunted place, and come to think of it what is the
difference between a haunted and a historical place after all? Maybe the latter
is a document of change, while the former has an event stamped on its very
identity forever, and if we were to extend that logic, will be entering the
area of difference between history and rhetoric, between memory and ideology? Mr.
Gerlach presents 14 locations by way of static shots, all places with terrific
immersive quality to them so much so that I would love to live in some of those
and be around the others – suburban houses, superstores, apartment complexes – and the
fact that haunted locations are more often than not spaces where domestic bliss
has been overturned is not entirely lost.

There’s these
static shots, and there’s a calm voiceover reading text (a lot of which I was
able to find verbatim from different news sites) that intends to be a factual narrative
of the events that occurred, all of them involving accidental cop shootings.
These shots do not linger too long after the voiceover, linking the facts to the space thereby affecting their identities,
and when the spaces start piling up with respect to the months of 2014, we
enter the not-so-apolitical zone of statistics. Spaces where you or I could
live a lovely little life almost seem to become hostage to a stream of events
that feel more like an epidemic, contextualized and re-contextualized, by the
time around them and the geography around them (all of them occur in Utah), and
a clear enough rhetoric emerges even without the depiction or staging of an
event. There are no people, just spaces and facts, and the grey areas that the
initial text around the law governing a peace officer’s usage of deadly force
merely alludes to is opened so wide these spaces seem to exist wholly and
solely within them. Experts often refer to the disposition of any man-made
structure – societies, SEZs etc. – and by the end of the year, these localities
seem to assume the sort of disposition Mr. Lynch was not so subtle about
in Blue Velvet. Mr. James Benning
sure does come to mind, but while his landscapes are variables of time, Mr.
Gerlach seems to suggest domestic places as hostages of their milieu.

Note: As I said, dear
reader, if you happen to watch this film on your laptop rather than at a
screening it might be advisable to refrain from seeking further context and
information than is being already formulated, for it only adds to the rhetoric.

From what I remember,
the impression I was provided by elders around was the Ms. Bhagyashree was the focal
point of Maine Pyar Kiya. And if
memory serves me well history Hum Aapke
Hain Kaun was a complete Madhuri Dixit show. I have Raja as evidence. I wouldn’t vouch for its authenticity but I do
remember Mr. Salman Khan complaining about not winning the Best actor award for
it in 1994 and his reasoning was that since it was the biggest hit of the year
he had to be the best actor. Don’t ask me, because I even remember Mr. Pramod
Moutho using the same weird-ass reasoning to claim his right to the Best
villain award for Raja Hindustani.
And that is not the point. The point is that, for whatever reasons, Mr. Khan
was almost never the focal point in his two biggest collaborations with Mr.
Barjatya, and the whole Prem thing is something that has been cooked ages after
the fact. Now, I do not want to go all meta on you and this film, but Mr.
Barjatya, who, if not anything else, is pretty alright crunching emotions on a
large-scale, seems to be least concerned with run-of-the-mill dramatic events
and corresponding closures. See, there are spoilers and I don’t think so you
need to be warned either. Read on, I say.

So
Mr. Khan is in a double role here, one a Prince by the name of Vijay and
another a small time stage actor Prem, and Maithili (Ms. Kapoor) is engaged to
the former and over the course of the film falls for the latter. When the time
comes for one (Vijay) to do the obligatory right thing and hand her over to the
other (Prem), Mr. Barjatya seems to feel almost too cool to go all melodramatic
on us, say like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai,
and end it all with a grand embrace. Rather, right before the cut away from the
scene (it is as a matter of fact the last moment of drama before the obligatory
closing song), she is still in the same frame (a sideways shot) with Vijay, who
now looks exactly like Prem. That’s it. No movement from one post to another.
Either is alright, Mr. Barjatya seems to tell me. And when I think of Mr. Khan’s
character in a palace full of mirrors trying to find a way out of his own
reflections, the film seems to practically beg for a meta-reading I do not in
the least want to oblige it with. But I guess Mr. Barjatya is not providing us
with that option because I think he is quite unhappy with Mr. Khan’s present larger-than-life
image. He probably doesn’t like his moustached avatar (Dabangg) and all the alpha-male antics around the women he is
courting. Maybe Prem is an extension, a sort of compensation, a character who
in his overall moral framework completes him, and he doesn’t like the fact that
what ought to be the actor’s defining character is being overwritten by several
others so different in their essence. I don’t know, I might just be pulling
stuff from my posterior, but the set-up, a variation on Bawarchi formula, is painfully simple – a patriarch’s dysfunctional
domestic set-up needs glue (Mr. Barjatya and his marketing team probably missed
an opportunity to have the Fevicol/Fevistick brand in there somewhere, thank you
very much). The variation is that the patriarch is played by Mr. Khan, and the
glue is played by Mr. Khan too, and in moments when both of them are on screen the
latter feels as if he were some sort of a spirit, so feeble in his presence, so
devoid of the narcissist streak, so single-minded in his purpose in the
narrative. As opposed to the popular understanding, Mr. Barjatya’s films don’t uphold
conservative values – his thought-process is probably too run-of-the-mill to do
that – and instead what his narratives do is undermine (I wouldn’t want to go
as far as subvert) and hopefully reverse traditional customs and rituals. More
often than not, Mr. Khan’s Prem has been the agent – in Maine Pyar Kiya the whole Mere Rang mein Rangne Wali is as close to an agreement to full-blown
pre-marital sex you are going to get in Mr. Barjatya’s films,
which has an interesting parallel here, once again closely linking the
not-so-much outdoor-but-not-so-much-indoor space with moral frivolity (don’t almost
all this flirtatious activities happen in such sort of spaces), and the whole
act of wearing a favorite revealing dress be some sort of response I can’t sink
my teeth into; in a world where the parents would meet-and-greet before
proceeding with a match, Mr. Khan’s Prem courteously went ahead and decided to
find his own in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun.
The point here is that Mr. Barjatya’s films, as were many others’, are
essentially liberal and we don’t have to burden him with the task representing
family values and traditions. For him they are just the framework within which
he can carve his romance and be naughty. What is a strict no for him though is
for somebody to woo his women by the size of their masculinity, ala Jeevan (Mr.
Mohnish Behl in Maine Pyar Kiya)
shooting pigeons and exercising a display of control, and I guess I can suspect
that is how Mr. Barjatya sees his alter-ego’s distortion into the present larger-than-life
image. So he gives that image an impersonal palatial complex, rigid traditions,
dysfunctional family and everything else we cannot really afford to connect
with, and proceeds to introduce the alter-ego he believes as the catalyst of
change. A sort of supporting member in his own narrative. Which is alright,
except for the fact that the whole film feels distinctly like a concept trying
its level best to have the vigor to metamorphose into a story, whose cause is
not helped in the least by the half-written dialogues. Mr. Barjatya could be
outrageously gifted in profiling walking figures under the light, his
compositions consisting of vertical lines supplementing the slender figure of
Ms. Kapoor still make the half-screens in multiplexes look tall, but for our
generation at least, the sound of the convenience of an English word within a
predominantly Hindi sentence quite simply breaks the illusion. The residual
feeling here though is of something that is slight, or maybe light, and the melodrama
just does not have the heft. Maybe by design, or maybe Mr. Barjatya was running
through the motions. Or let me put it this way, if this were the 90s then Mr.
David Dhawan would be feeling little to no compulsion to make a comedy out of
this premise.